The doorknob was rattling. He did not consider that. Only the faces behind it. There was too little time to say what he thought, what he truly felt, and he doubted that even with the desperate longing that stirred in his heart he could have summoned the ages needed to prove his love. That was perhaps the only irony to which he'd ever succumbed. That he was ageless, without a fading time as the others had, and yet he never had enough of it. To say what he felt. To confess his own sins. To relieve himself of the pains that he carried with him. All along, he'd thought that he needed to become something else to see what Bahamut wanted him to see. And as it turned out, the time he had was all the time he needed.
That was what Orb would not understand, could never understand. That there were never enough moments if you were always seeking, endlessly seeking more. That whatever you sought to be was the thing that would be denied to you. To simply be, what you were and who you were, would yield all the treasures of this mortal world Splinters of wood were firing themselves against his boots, against his legs. Orb was doing something that Koe could not understand. This, too, did not matter. The ocarina was playing a lovely tune. One that he knew from his childhood.
At the same instant, they loosed their wild magics upon one another. Orb's eyes were flung open with surprise when a single thread of fire lanced through his chest. No thicker than a strand of yarn. Yet as soon as it emerged from his back, the thread unraveled. Wild tentacles of flame began to lash into the air. Those, too, began to unravel. The strands of fire were multiplying exponentially, flinging him from wall and into banister. Yet the fire touched nothing save his skin, nothing save his wretched form. For his part, Koe never saw the magic directed at him. Only a density of air that he could not escape.
When the door swung open to reveal a corridor, it revealed splintered wood and shattered glass in multitudes. They were strewn everywhere - embedded in the wall, in the door, in the banister. Scattered across the corridor, and the stairs leading to the first floor. Somehow the trembling had ceased. Nothing in the corridor seemed to immediately suggest the reason, until one's eyes fell upon the dead illusionist. Orb's body was nothing more than a twisted mass of skin fused with metal - silver, it seemed, of the strangest kind. Where skin and hair had stopped the ruined silver began, bleeding into the wood. What one could see of Orb's skin was pale, pale white. As though not a single ray of sun had ever touched it. For the first and last time, his face was his true face, the one which had been hidden since the very beginning.
Koe was slumped against the far wall. Ocarina cradled in his hands, resting in his lap. His body that of a still-life, frozen. There was no breath flooding his lungs and no light behind the lids of his eyes. It suggested nothing of what happened to him - not so much as a hair was out of place on his head - but the master bard was, and would remain, as lifeless as his opponent.